In a conventional Direct Digital Synthesis (DDS) approaches, a digital waveform is synthesized by accumulating a value equal to a fraction of pi every clock cycle. The value is stored in an accumulator. An output of the accumulator is translated into a digital waveform through a fixed or programmable look up table that contains the desired waveform for all values of pi. With such a conventional architecture, the frequency of a synthesized waveform depends on a programmed value equal to the desired radian change per clock cycle (i.e., DDS seed) and the clock frequency used to accumulate the DDS seed values. With conventional approaches, if either the DDS seed or the clock frequency changes, the frequency of the synthesized waveform of the output also changes. Therefore, if a system clock is phase locked to an external reference source, the stability of the DDS waveform frequency is directly proportional to the stability of the system clock.
It would be desirable to have a system to synthesize a digital waveform to maintain a constant output frequency independently of variations in the system clock frequency.